The official Peak Oil thread (or why oil prices keep going up)

[True Federalist (진정한 연방 주의자)]

Weprobably have enough oil to use for at least a century despite teh fact that proven reserves are only able to last for a few decades.  Why? It's because of the way proven reserves are defined.: "Oil that can be profitaby extracted using existing technology and at current prices."  For over a century as the price of oil as changed and the techniques to extract petoleum have improved, the level of proven reserves has hovered fairly constantly in the 30-40 year range.  Increasing the price of oil makes new extraction techinques profitable to use, and once they are actually in use, the cost of using them goes down as the technique is refined., which eventually causes the price of oil to go back down. Of course there is a limit to all this somwhere.  Then what will happen of course is that the price of petrofuels will rise until they  become comparable to the price of biofuels such as ethanol and biodiesel, at which point, production will begin to shift towards them instead, assuming that a economical replacement for the internal combustion engine never comes along.  There is no need to panic over the price of oil.